AuthorTopic: South Florida law schools (Read 3558 times)

Thanks! For the final round of negotiations I asked St. Thomas to drop the stipulations on my full ride offer completely. If they do that, that will probably change my mind a lot considering I can probably keep my debt load under $25k for the entire 3 years combined. However, almost half of St. Thomas' graduating class did not get legal jobs this past year so I'm going to have to do a lot of networking/externships

Did you ever negotiate with FIU? I'm sure if St. Thomas and Nova offered you $$, you can get something from FIU. That, plus the fact that FIU is so cheap for Florida Residents, would make it pretty enticing.

I really do not like FIU. I took a tour and the faculty and students just seemed so out of touch with the reality of the legal market. It's just not for me. I enjoyed my visit to St. Thomas very much and Miami even more so I would probably be picking between those two. Nova was alright when I took my visit but something about St. Thomas stood out a little more.

Just submitted two more applications to Mercer (they're sending someone down here on behalf of the scholarship committee) and FSU. I just realized how cheap FSU would be for me due to in state tuition (about $30k a year total with COL included) do you guys think I have a shot at FSU with my 3.8/154?

I'm a lawyer in Washington, DC. My daughter has a Dec '13 LSAT score of 157 and a 3.17 GPA from Ohio State. She is moving to Miami this month and hopes to attend law school at St. Thomas, FIU, or Miami. Clearly, her numbers stack up well with St. Thomas. Based on her LSAT/GPA, is she fairly competitive at FIU and Miami?

FIU is probably more of a realistic scenario. Her lsat is median and her gpa is at 25th percentile at Miami so she might have a shot to get in there and as a South Florida resident, I would urge you to stay away from the dumpster fire that is St. Thomas as they do not have a strong alumni base or reputation down here. I was considering going there but they refused to drop the ridiculous stipulations that came with my scholarship offer. I would suggest looking at lawschoolnumbers.com and looking at applicants from this cycle and last cycle to see where she stacks up. Good luck!

Lawschoolnumbers.com will give you a fairly good idea of what her options are.

If your daughter can attain residency FIU is defiently the best bet from a financial standpoint with in-state tuition it is only about 14k per year opposed Miami, St. Thomas, etc which cost around 35-40k per year. Over a three year period it ads up to 42k per year over 120k.

Update: my daughter was accepted at UM and FIU ($47k scholarship). I was quite surprised at the quick turnaround on both applications. UM went from "file complete" to "admitted" in six days. FIU took one day.

That is great news! However, one thing to look at with law school scholarships are the conditions. Usually a merit scholarship will be contingent on maintaing a certain GPA or class rank. i.e the scholarship will be 16,000 per year contingent on a 3.0 GPA the first year is guaranteed money, but if she falls below a 3.0 the scholarship is lost for 2l and 3l.

Maintaining a 3.0 sounds easy since anyone attending an ABA law school achieved that quite easily in undergrad. However, law school is different it is full of smart, hard working, motivated people and the way most schools work is that only 35% of first year students can achieve a 3.0, which means there is 65% chance the incoming student will not keep their scholarship year two and three.

Each school is slightly different, but really read the conditions on the scholarship. If they sound burdensome negotiate for better ones and also don't be afraid to ask for scholarship money from Miami.

Your daughter has good options and should be proud of her accomplishments, but many people don't understand the scholarship system so I like to inform incoming law students.